You don’t need to be a digital expert to know that the tech industry is booming. As a result, coding skills are highly coveted with the demand for developers ever increasing. But the market is moving fast and languages are constantly evolving, adding a programming language to your CV will put you in high demand. Though what language should you learn? And what is the programming language of the future?

What language to choose really depends on the sector you find yourself in, the digital space tends to lean towards highly versatile open-source web languages like PHP, JavaScript,Python and Ruby.

These languages are designed to be simple and easy to write, making them a great choice when designing websites and mobile apps that need less rigour with more flexibility and have to be created quickly.

In the financial world, systems are designed to perform a high volume of complicated functions whilst remaining highly organised. The financial sector benefits from languages with object-oriented paradigms and strong architectural patterns backed by a lot of guidance from the organizations around the languages. That’s why a lot of financial institutions have the majority of their applications written in C# and Java. They provide maintainable options that a lot of other languages can’t do as well.

These staple languages are sure to last, though with major tech firms such as Facebook, Mozilla and Google needing even more versatility and stability than what the current options provide, we are seeing a new wave of next generation languages being created; rather than tailoring their products to what current programming languages can do, they’ve gone back to the beginning to create new languages to allow what they want their product to do.

They better serve these companies with speed, versatility and reliability needed for the demands of gigantic modern websites– are Google Go, Julia, Dart, Rust or Hack the ones to watch for the future or should we stick to new releases of the current classic batch?

I RECOMMEND:

For Digital –With PHP currently running 33% of the internet it is a mainstay of web development – however due to performance issues when coding large websites it has been out-of-favour in recent times with many firms opting forRuby or Python instead. Other major languages are Java (for Android), JavaScript & Objective-C.

Keep an eye out for Google Go as one to go big in the coming years, along with Server-Side JavaScript (Node.js – not strictly a separate language but worthy of being mentioned), Ruby and Mobile specific Objective-C or Java for Android.

For Finance – There are 2 main languages with Java and C# the foundations of the financial world. I’d recommend going with C# as banks are seeming to favour the higher support on offer from Microsoft since Java has made the move to Open-Source.

For R&D/Academics – Scientific Research and academia require languages that support highly accurate mathematics, extremely fast execution, and a focus around the implementation of the language versus any specific organizational. One to watch for the future here would be Python.characteristics like object orientation, the academic and scientific communities often use languages like Scala for mathematical calculations, C++ for heavy processing, along with Python to accomplish their tasks.

What programming language you should learn is up to you and entirely dependent on what direction you wish to go – Digital Media, Coding for finance or into Academia. In terms of the languages I think will be the most popular in the not too distant future I’d stick my neck out and go for JavaScript for its ability to be both Client & Server-side along with Google GO.

More importantly, learning a programming language has become more important than ever for the forward looking professional with the world becoming ever more digital, I promise it won’t be time wasted!